Google Is Reportedly Looking To Take Over Call Centres With Its Duplex AI Assistant

A headset hangs on a cubical wall after the last telemarketing shift at Spectrum Marketing Services, Inc. 26 September 2003 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Getty)

When Google introduced Google Duplex, its AI assistant designed to speak like a human, the company showed off how the average person could use the tech to save time making reservations and whatnot.

What wasn’t touched on was the possibility that Duplex may have a use on the other side of the line, taking over for call centre employees and telemarketers.

A report from The Information suggests Google may be making a play to find other applications for its human-sounding assistant and has already started experimenting with ways to use Duplex to do with away roles currently filled by humans — a move that could have ramifications for millions of people.

Citing a person familiar with Google’s plans, The Information reported the company is already in conversation with at least one potential customer that would like to integrate Duplex into its operations. That firm, an unnamed large insurance company, is reportedly interested in using the voice assistant to handle simple, straightforward customer service calls.

If Google can find its way into the business of automated phone calls for companies, it could creep its way into a massive profit centre. The research firm ResearchAndMarkets projects the cloud-based customer call centre market will reach about $US21 billion ($28 billion) by 2022 — up from $US6.8 billion ($9 billion) in 2017.

Of course, as the market expands, so will the competition, and Google isn’t the only major tech firm that sees opportunity in entering call centres.

Last year, Amazon started selling a version of its wildly popular voice assistant Alexa designed specifically for use responding to questions via phone and text. Companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Cisco also already have their foot in the door of this business, per The Information.

While there may be major profits awaiting these firms as the conquer call centres, they also come with a cost: Humans will inevitably be bumped from the jobs. Most companies already outsource the work to countries where they can pay paltry wages in order to keep the expenses related to customer service down, and AI would likely cut those costs even more.

Historically, one of the biggest obstacles to eliminating the human aspect of customer call interactions is the fact that the AI kinda sucks to deal with. A 2015 survey conducted by Boston University found that the vast majority of people — 90 per cent of those questioned — call into customer service hoping to speak with a human. About eight in 10 said they speed through the automated portion with the intention of talking to a person, and just 10 per cent reported being satisfied with so-called “interactive voice response systems”.

Google Duplex may have a solution to that problem by making the automated interactions less robotic and more life-like. Google wowed people with its demo of Duplex that included the AI assistant inserting “um” and “uh” sounds to make the conversation seem more fluid.

That may also have the complete opposite effect on people. Some folks found the Duplex demo was scary as hell and worried about the ethical concerns of AI basically faking people out by pretending to be human.

That seems to be a hang-up for Google’s efforts to get into the call centre business, as well. According to The Information, “ethical concerns” overshadowed Google’s demonstration of the Duplex technology, and the company interested in the assistant has pumped the brakes on the proposed project.

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